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Craig-Rosenberg Debate Transcripts, Book Excerpts & Replies Craig-Rosenberg Debate Transcripts, Book Excerpts & Replies Section Page Chapter 2: Debate – Is Faith in God Reasonable? 2 Chapter 3: God and the Rational Basis for Science, Robert Kaita 41 Chapter 4: Faith in Anything is Unreasonable, Victor J. Stenger 59 Chapter 5: God Without Argument, Paul K. Moser 79 Chapter 6: Some Philosophical Aspects of the Debate, Theodore M. Drange 101 Chapter 7: There are Serious Reasons for Belief in the Existence of God, Timothy McGrew 120 Chapter 8: Not Reasonable but Not Unreasonable, Michael Ruse 141 Chapter 9: Rhetoric as Hermeneutic Key, Martin J. Medhurst 155 Chapter 10: Faith, not Reason, Underwrites the Belief in God, Clarke Roundtree 176 Craig: Reply to our Respondents 199 Rosenberg: Reply to Critics 211 1 Chapter 2: Debate- Is Faith in God Reasonable? 1 The Debate: Is Faith In God Reasonable? William Lane Craig vs. Alex Rosenberg William Lane Craig: Opening Speech Good evening! I am delighted to be able to participate in tonight’s debate, and I count it a real privilege to be discussing this important issue with Dr. Rosenberg. Tonight we are interested in discussing some of the arguments that make belief in God reasonable or unreasonable. So in my opening speech I’m going to present several arguments which I think make it reasonable to believe God exists. Then in my second speech I will respond to Dr. Rosenberg’s arguments against the reasonableness of belief in God. I believe that God’s existence best explains a wide range of the data of human experience. Let me just mention eight. 1. God is the best explanation of why anything at all exists. Suppose you were hiking through the forest and came upon a ball lying on the ground. You would naturally wonder how it came to be there. If your hiking buddy said to you, “Just forget about it! It just exists inexplicably!”, you would think either that he was joking or that he wanted you to just keep moving. No one would take seriously the idea that the ball just exists without any explanation. Now notice that merely increasing the size of the ball, even until it becomes coextensive with the universe, does nothing to provide, or remove the need for, an explanation of its existence. So what is the explanation of the existence of the universe (where by “the universe” I mean all of spacetime reality)? The explanation of the universe can lie only in a transcendent reality beyond the universe, beyond space and time, which is metaphysically necessary in its existence. Now there is only one way I can think of to get a contingent universe from a 2 Chapter 2: Debate- Is Faith in God Reasonable? 2 necessarily existing cause, and that is if the cause is a personal agent who can freely choose to create a contingent reality. It therefore follows that the best explanation of the existence of the contingent universe is a transcendent, personal being--which is what everybody means by “God.” We can summarize this reasoning as follows: (1) Every contingent thing has an explanation of its existence. (2) If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is a transcendent, personal being. (3) The universe is a contingent thing. (4) Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence. (5) Therefore, the explanation of the universe is a transcendent, personal being. —which is what everybody means by “God.” 2. God is the best explanation of the origin of the universe. We have pretty strong evidence that the universe is not eternal in the past but had an absolute beginning a finite time ago. In 2003 Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin were able to prove that any universe which has, on average, been in a state of cosmic expansion cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past spacetime boundary.1 What makes their proof so powerful is that it holds regardless of the physical description of the very early universe. Because we don’t yet have a quantum theory of gravity, we can’t yet provide a physical description of the first split-second of the universe. But the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem is independent of any physical description of that moment. Their theorem implies that the quantum vacuum state which may have characterized the early universe cannot be eternal in the past but must have had an absolute beginning. Even if our universe is just a tiny part of a so-called “multiverse” composed of many universes, their theorem requires that the multiverse itself must have an absolute beginning. Of course, highly speculative scenarios, such as loop quantum gravity models, string models, even closed timelike curves, have been proposed to try to avoid this absolute beginning. 3 Chapter 2: Debate- Is Faith in God Reasonable? 3 These models are fraught with problems, but the bottom line is that none of these models, even if true, succeeds in restoring an eternal past. Last spring at a conference in Cambridge celebrating the 70th birthday of Stephen Hawking, Vilenkin delivered a paper entitled “Did the Universe Have a Beginning?”, which surveyed current cosmology with respect to that question. He argued--and I quote--, “none of these scenarios can actually be past-eternal.”2 He concluded, “All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.”3 But then the inevitable question arises: Why did the universe come into being? What brought the universe into existence? There must have been a transcendent cause which brought the universe into being. We can summarize our argument thus far as follows: (1) The universe began to exist. (2) If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a transcendent cause. (3) Therefore, the universe has a transcendent cause. By the very nature of the case that cause must be a transcendent, immaterial being. Now there are only two possible things that could fit that description: either an abstract object like a number or an unembodied mind or consciousness. But abstract objects don’t stand in causal relations. The number seven, for example, has no effect on anything. Therefore the cause of the universe is plausibly an unembodied mind or person. Thus we are brought, not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its Personal Creator. 3. God is the best explanation of the applicability of mathematics to the physical world. Philosophers and scientists have puzzled over what physicist Eugene Wigner called “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.”4 How is it that a mathematical theorist like Peter Higgs can sit down at his desk and, by pouring over mathematical equations, predict the 4 Chapter 2: Debate- Is Faith in God Reasonable? 4 existence of a fundamental particle which experimentalists 30 years later, after investing millions of dollars and thousands of man hours, are finally able to detect? Mathematics is the language of nature. But how is this to be explained? If mathematical objects are abstract entities causally isolated from the universe, then the applicability of mathematics is, in the words of philosopher of mathematics Mary Leng, “a happy coincidence.”5 On the other hand, if mathematical objects are just useful fictions, how is it that nature is written in the language of these fictions? In his book, Dr. Rosenberg emphasizes that naturalism “doesn’t tolerate cosmic coincidences.”6 But the naturalist has no explanation of the uncanny applicability of mathematics to the physical world. By contrast, the theist has a ready explanation: when God created the physical universe, he designed it on the mathematical structure he had in mind. We can summarize this argument as follows: (1) If God did not exist, the applicability of mathematics would be a happy coincidence. (2) The applicability of mathematics is not a happy coincidence. (3) Therefore, God exists. 4. God is the best explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. In recent decades scientists have been stunned by the discovery that the initial conditions of the Big Bang were fine-tuned for the existence of intelligence life with a precision and delicacy that literally defy human comprehension. Now there are three live explanatory options for this extraordinary fine-tuning: physical necessity, chance, or design. Physical necessity is not, however, a plausible explanation because the finely tuned constants and quantities are independent of the laws of nature. Therefore they are not physically necessary. 5 Chapter 2: Debate- Is Faith in God Reasonable? 5 So could the fine-tuning be due to chance? The problem with this explanation is that the odds of a life-permitting universe governed by our laws of nature are just so infinitesimal that they cannot be reasonably faced. Therefore, the proponents of chance have been forced to postulate the existence of a World Ensemble of other universes, preferably infinite in number and randomly ordered, so that life-permitting universes will appear by chance somewhere in the Ensemble. Not only is this hypothesis, to borrow Richard Dawkins’ phrase, “an unparsimonious extravagance,”7 but it faces an insuperable objection. By far, most of the observable universes in a World Ensemble would be worlds in which a single brain fluctuates into existence out of the vacuum and observes its otherwise empty world. Thus, if our world were just a member of a random Ensemble, we ought to be having observations like that. Since we don’t, that strongly disconfirms the World Ensemble hypothesis. So chance is also not a good explanation. It follows that design is the best explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe. Thus the fine-tuning of the universe constitutes evidence for a cosmic Designer.
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